Remember Forever
by Dreamingsinger
Summary: Doctor Who/Ayreon crossover story. The Doctor and Clara stumble in a strange alternative timeline for the universe. Whatever happened to humanity's great future among the stars. It seems they only blew themselves up instead. What if the Human race had a creation story, and it was not what anyone would have imagined? Alien lifeforms, light-beings, yeah keep on reading.
1. Chapter 1

**Notes; I never though I'd ever experiment with a crossover story but one day recently it hit me like a pile of bricks that I just had to try this one. The idea was just not going to leave me alone until I give it a go. Actually I originally wanted to write something based on "Ayreon", a series of progressive rock albums that actually tell a very obvious, detailed,and interesting science fiction type story. It seemed like it would be very interesting if the two universes came together. The story line of this fiction will likely end up a bit darker, because I am roughly following the Ayreon plot, which if you follow the story line, is actually pretty grim and even a bit creepy. I plan thouhg still to write something that can be easily followed and will make complete sense to readers who are fans of either or.**

**Reviews are more than welcome or course. **

Clara was getting ready to leave her classroom on a Friday at the end of the school day. She reached for her purse, stored under her desk, and set it down on her lap to dig for her lip gloss, which she quickly applied while daydreaming of a bubble bath and night watching romantic comedies in her comfy flat. She thought of stopping for a bottle of some decent wine on her way home and, decided she may as well go shopping for curtains over the weekend. Perhaps a couple of new floor lamps would be nice while she was at it. She imagined as she stood in her empty classroom, applying pink lip gloss and thinking of her new curtain color, just how boring her life must have seemed to almost anyone at all, just how ordinary. She almost laughed to herself. If only they knew even one small part of the truth.

The sudden loud whirring and whining sound, made her look around the room, but still it happened too fast to really catch it's direct well enough at all. It was only when the Doctor quickly threw open the door to her storage cabinet, that she knew for sure where his ship had landed. Still his sudden landing had only managed to startled her, causing her to jump up from her office chair, sending it crashing against the blackboard, and the entire contents of her open purse dumping onto the floor.

"What is God's name..." she cried, scrambling to retrieve her spilled belongings.

"A fine aim you have with that chair," he said laughing, but somehow his tine was serious too. "I must make a note of that skill of yours. Next time we are on some alien planet backed into a corner, angry enemies approaching, you could more than likely take the whole lot of them down with a well aimed office chair."

"Very funny," Clara mumbled, finally managing to get everything back in order. "What you doing, parking in my cupboard again?"

The Doctor only shrugged. "Good a place as any to park her. You coming?"

"Now? Where? Why?"

"I figure, why not go to Mars." The Doctor's answer sounded exactly like he casually went to such places on a regular basis.

Clara stood blinking her eyes in confusion at him for at least a few seconds. "You mean the planet?"

"Of course. What else would I possibly mean. Timed right we'll get there just in time for breakfast and a great view of the moons."

"Doctor, it's four in the afternoon."

"Oh it quite possibly is, yes. But not in Mars's eastern timezone."

Clara was beyond baffled by the whole matter. She had planned on her hot bath, her movies, her weekend of living normal boring old ordinary life. And now she was listening to some seemingly senseless ranting about breakfast and a view on a planet she knew full well was neither friendly to life, or inhabited. The curiosity that drove her to travel, to chase after the crazy Timelord time and again compelled her once again and with little more than a second thought she was back on board his time-ship again.

"The first human explorers finally made it to Mars in the year 2037, claimed it for the human race. They've just been building and building since. Creating atmosphere, planting trees, mining resources, starting little families that grow up watching dust storms like you would have watching rainfall." The Doctor went about explaining the history of something his companion barely understand as he dematerialized his ship. "See this is a reason I keep coming back to humanity as an amazing spices of being. Your need to do the impossible time and again. Someone tells a group of humans they'll never get of the ground, and you go off and eventually build the first cities on a planet they always said is nothing but rocks and freezing cold. Push the blue button, to your left."

"I just told a room full of school kids last Tuesday that they would not likely see man reach Mars in their lifetimes. Too far, too, too long, of a mission, all that boring old fact stuff," Clara remarked, as she pushed the button and hold on to the control console. "Tell me I didn't just wrong disappoint a bunch of twelve year olds."

The Ship rematerialized, with a loud obnoxious noise, and the Doctor shoved open the door with far less caution than his companion knew he should have had. Within a few seconds though she slowly and very cautiously walked outside herself.

They had landed inside a pressurized building, with perfectly safe air. It became quickly apparent that they were at the end of a narrow windowless passageway. Dim artifical lighting flickered overhead from a ceiling barely more then a couple of meters high. The place was light metal and plastic, and silent except for a wind heard well from somewhere outside. The pair wandered slowly through the passage until it met up with another slightly wider and higher one.

This second passage though revealed little more than the first. No signs of people, no evidence of life or existence of anyone at all. Surely the place should have contained the cries of children, the sounds of a dropped dish, or even the noise of a badly tuned radio. But there was so far nothing at all. It was easy enough to assume they had landed inside some little used area. They both walked together down a new passage and then another one, taking themselves further an further from where they had landed, but still no closer to finding anyone at all.

"Where is everbody?" Clara questioned slowly as she walked forward. She was getting nervous and had no idea why. It was only an abandoned building so far. Surely no clear and present danger. She had had trouble walking right since stepping out of the time ship, and she almost lost her footing as she tried to step over a scrap of a metal laying on the floor.

"Not sure yet," the Doctor answered. "We'll find them. We must have come at a bad time. Maybe they are in a meeting or something. And be careful trying to walk here. Much less gravity."

"Well I know that of course," Clara said, still considering the empty and silent passageways. "It's one thing to read up on a subject, to think about what gravity must be like here, but another to try to walk fast in it. Do you suppose there's some danger in here. Bad air maybe, leaking chemicals? Something that can kill us? Should we actually be in here?"

"Good point. Worth checking." In the next second the Doctor had his well trusted sonic screwdriver in his hand, spinning slowing on the spot and walking forward ad back a bit scanning the air around them.

"Air's fine. The slight chemical readings would seem to be little more than some engine coolant and bleach. Same stuff you'd smell in any workshop on Earth."

"Okay next question? Do we actually want to meet whoever lives here? I mean we have no idea..."

The Doctor laughed at her. "Clara, Clara. These are not some aliens bent on humanity's death and destruction. They're human people like you, rasing families, working, living, chasing humanity's dream so others don't have to. You look so nervous today. What for?"

She shook her head. "I'm fine. I mean I don't think it's anything really."

The came to a place where they faced a dead end in front of them. But to the left right two new passages lead in opposite directions. The Doctor grinned at his companion.

"You check the left one, Ill check the right. Call me if you find anything interesting, or terrifying or whatever it is you humans tend to yell about."

Clara was about to object, to suggest the wisdom of sticking together. But the Doctor was gone running straight down the righthand passage, before she could even open her mouth to speak.

"Why is it," she asked herself out loud while she slowly took the lefthand one, "even the simple days of looking for breakfast and moonrises, end up with me alone in passagesways with flickering lights."

She found herself shuddering slightly with an anxiety she could not explain. She found herself worrying strangely enough that the lights could simply all go out. She worried about just how dark the place would be if the power should fail. Something wasn't right and she wished she had at least a hint of what that something could be. There was no clear danger and yet she stood nervous and trembling and feeling somehow far too alone. It was that feeling of almost complete aloneness she realized then, that she could not understand or get over. She asked herself what it all meant and shook her head, not even close to knowing the answer.

She came to the end of that hallway before she expected to, and found herself facing a simple lightweight white door instead of just another turn off. She stood facing the door for a moment, and unsure what to do, she slowly reached out and knocked on it.

"Hello?" She called, and a second time slightly louder while knocking again. Not a sound answered her back.

Slowly, carefully, she turned the handle and pushed open the door. Walking in, with even greater caution, as her strange anxiety grew worse, she found herself in what must have been someone's workroom, office and living space, all sort of throw in together, combined in one space for what she could only guess was for reason of practicality. Computers and related equipment sat here and there on top of the work tables. There was a fancy futuristic looking thing that could have only been a two way radio of sorts sitting near one keyboard. Science equipment of many kinds was thrown carefully about and most of it knocked over. Coils of wire and tools were tossed onto the tables and floor. Somewhere in the small room something she knew was meant to be a a sleeping place and on the other side of the room were a collection of plants, most likely taken from a greenhouse that had to have existed but had not been discovered yet.

The place was in safe enough condition and the scans had of course confirmed no leaks of anything of such concern. But the place was nevertheless obviously falling apart as far as ideal standard conditions for highly technical life support structures, would surely have seen it. The flickering lights were one thing, but the walls were dented in places and looking like a fatal collapse could happen within years. The more she looked at tables and storage cupboards, the more missing bolts and screws she counted. One small cupboard door, she noted, was hanging by only a bottom hinge. She knew it could let go and crash to the floor at any point, simply from it's own weight.

"Doctor," Clara called, turned back toward the door she had left open. She stayed in the room, looking around again, trying to notice anything interesting, or perhaps any sign of anyone coming to at least fix some hinges.

She turned to a dusty computer set up on a work table closest to her. The unit contained a keyboard mic , speaker, and headset and it made complete sense to assume it was the one most commonly used. The technology was ahead of her own time of course, but still, turning it on was a simple enough thing, even given her limited skills. A data disc sat nearby on the tabletop, clearly placed with greater thought than the many randomly thrown around items all over the room. Barely thinking twice she placed it into the disc drive as the computer finished starting up. At once a moving image came onto the screen and the speaker made a terrible cracking feedback noise. The picture on the screen was poorly filmed and likely damaged. The screen was filled with rolling grey horizontal lines and the video was somewhere between black and white and slightly colored, but she could still clearly make out the image of a young man possibly under twenty, dressed in simple blue clothing.

"Whoever it is that might be listening to this at any point, hello." she heard over the speaker as the sound caught up to the picture, still full of some feedback but audible. "My name is Franklin Mijovic-Anderson. I am about nineteen years old. It's safe to assume I am the last human alive, and I have not successfully found reason to think otherwise."

Clara gasped in shock at her horrifying discovery. But she went on listening, curiosity and dread equaling driving her.

"The year is currently 2115, or at least I think it is. I am losing track of such details and cannot be bothered to figure it out. It hardly matters now I suppose. A little history lesson for anyone who may be listening now, however that may be possible, all things considered. 2084 was the year everyone on Earth came to an end. Apparently it went up nearly at once over only about four hours. Just a few hours to desamate an entire planet. Who knows who fired first or who they were aiming at, but nation after nation where all very quickly firing nuclear weapons at each other. I guess in a couple of hours the world was dying and in only a couple more everyone was gone. It was all rubble and dust and fallout, a planet made into a scrap-yard filled with bodies. I never did learn what it was all for. I wish sometimes I understand that and sometimes I don't think I would have wanted to know. But the colony on Mars was left behind, far from the damage and the madness of it all. I guess they just kept going, kept trying to make it here though nothing was near ready to stand alone yet without Earth's help. I was not even born yet. I've only read of all this in the records and share with you now the best I can. This place has been failing, slowly dying itself as long as I've lived. I am the last of the citizens still alive. It's all helpless now. I'll never be rescued and if something should happen to me, there is no one to ever know about it."

The sound and the picture came to a sudden end after that. The file menu that came up indicated there was more on the disc, but Clara only clicked the close button instead. She stood staring that the now quite computer showing only a blue screen, and shock terribly for a good minute or more.

"Something is... very wrong here." the Doctor speakign suddenly in the silent room made her turn quickly. She hadn't even known he had been standing behind her, listening to the boy speak as well.

"This isn't where we meant to come, is it?" she asked, shakily.

"No. Well it is and it isn't. This is a Mars colony yes. There's no doubt about that. But it's all wrong. Time is all wrong."

"Doctor, I've seen the future far beyond today. I know for sure the world did not end in 2084. That's less than sixty years from my own time. That's just not possible."

"It's an alternate time stream of some kind. It's got to be. I can't imagine what else could have happen other than flying through the time-stream to land into some alternate version.

You're right Clara, that's only sixty years. Time felt fine when we left Earth. If the human race was about to be wiped out of history I'd have sensed it sooner. Clara, come on, hurry. We've got to go. And grab that disc will you. We might find more clues on there."


	2. Chapter 2

Clara questioned endlessly as the two of them got back into the time ship. She sat down on the stairs near the center console, still holding the disc in her hand, and looked from it to the Doctor and back again repeatedly as she questioned, still shaken up.

"Doctor? Why did we just run off. Why not stay and look for the boy, take him with us, or..."

"That boy died years ago. Clara we were looking only at information he must have left behind a hundred years ago. That was not a recent recording."

"You're sure he'd not just recorded that last week and is simply off working somewhere, waiting for someone to help him? Maybe he ran off to find tools for his cupboards?"

"I thought about all that too. No chance I'd run off and leave him stranded if I thought he was alive somewhere. But the condition of the place, and the time readout makes it clear as anything. It's been a very long time. We are not leaving anyone behind. Only the thoughts of what humanity could have been."

"Okay fair enough. But he mentioned a nuclear war that destroyed the Earth? How did that start in the first place?"

"I have no idea yet. My best guesses would be resources or religion. Two things humans never seem to stop fighting about."

"You said we've crossed into a new time stream, right? How did we do that?"

"Well I told my ship to fly to Mars and gave her a year to aim for. She did all that of course, but sometimes this old ship gets a little funny with navigation. This old ship is old. Flying all over inside the time stream, with streams and possibilities everywhere and all she's aiming for is one little red planet. I think she made a wrong turn."

"So how we get back?"

The Doctor laughed slightly at that question and thought for a second before saying hesitantly. "I should just be able to reverse her back through the vortex, use our last location, your classroom, as a destination and then off we go."

"So let's go then."

he laughed again at his companions suggestion. "You want to just leave, go off home to normal old known history and future, never knowing what happened in this one? A universe without human's in it, now that's something new, and you Clara are the only living human being in it now."

Clara stared at the floor for a moment considering. After a second though her face lit up again with that same emotion that made her keep on running around the universe and time and space in the first place. "Okay, let's stay and see what's going on here."

She jumped up from the steps and ran to stand by the console, by now as excited as usual to explore. Her past unease was fading as she grew used the future being unlike the ones she had seen before.

Somewhere in the universe, presumably far away from Earth and anything known or identifiable, the two of them sat at the edge of the open door of the blue box safely behind the invisible shielding. Space was close to empty in the place they had materialized. A few stars were scattered here and there, but the distance from one the the next was enormous and little but a few sparse but colorful gas clouds hovered aimlessly. Clara looked out over this near nothingness, feeling a mix of wonder and near fright at just how empty it was. Her home on Earth, she knew, was so far away by then. No, she reminded herself. In this strange new time line it was no more at all. She understood for the first time in all of her traveling and in seeing so much, in so many places, just how small she was, just how small any individual was really.

"So," she asked, still looking outside and trying to shake the thought that she might actually recognize anything at all there, "Where are we?"

"Some small galaxy somewhere hard to explain," the Doctor answered. "Not sure the place has a name exactly. It's a small one. Very old compared to some. No planets left at all, and the stars are getting old and slowly burning out. In a few million more years I would think the whole tiny galaxy will be almost nothing at all. We are near its outer edge."

"That's amazing."

Clara was about to say more but a faraway motion caught her attention. She lost sight of whatever it was she had seen for a second but looking out over space, given its vast emptiness, she was able to find it again quickly. She blinked her eyes and confusion and looked again still more less puzzled over it. She was starting right at a bright flash of light that made its way across the blackness. In the first moment it looked certainly pretty, and a curious thing, but little more. She knew very little about such things, but it seemed to her safe enough to assume the light was explainable by some science or other, even so far from anything bright. That was until in the next moment of watching it curiously, the thing sharply changed direction at least seventy degrees. She blinked and stared again, more intently. Now she knew that surely such a thing as that kind of movement should have been impossible out there.

She went on watching as whatever source of light it was she was observing, as it appeared to slow down and then actually pick up speed again in seconds. It changed direction again, moving almost back the way it had first come, before it slowed to a near stop and then turned again to fly another way, picking up speed rapidly again. Of course, Clara thought, feeling a bit silly at having missed the obvious. It had to be a spaceship of some kind, some other explorer out there in the middle of universal nowhere, for reasons she could only guess at. She found herself growing worried when she saw another of the same sort of moving lights fly into her field of vision from another direction and then a third from what looked from her perspective to be above. She watched all three of them now, coming from their various directions, with more fear and concern than much else.

"Doctor," she gasped, still watching the lights, scared to let them out of her sight for a second. "I think we are going to be surrounded."

"Fascinating," the Doctor said quickly, in a tone that indicated quite clearly that he had barely actually heard what she said at all.

"Doctor!" she cried, finally looking at him and trying urgently to get his attention. "Those ships are going to surround us!"

"Sorry, what? Ships? Oh no, I don't think they will."

"What is..."

"They aren't spaceships," the Doctor explained, paying equal attention by then to both her and the lights outside. "That's incredible. I thought that was all a myth. Some kind of mistranslated and badly recalled story from the childhoods of the ancients, left in the books in the halls of history..."

"Are those alive? Like actual living and independently functioning creatures, way out here, surviving in space?"

"There were only a couple of references to them anywhere, that I ever happened to find. We knew them only as Universal Migrators. The older folks used to talk about them a bit back in my school days. Some say they created the universe itself. Others said no, that could not be. At any rate, they're been here long before much else. Maybe millions of years, flying across space, never really getting anywhere, and yet seeing so much. I would guess they live only to explore, to seek and find the possibility of it all."

"They don't seem dangerous now at all"

"Of course not."

"What are they doing?" Clara wondered out loud. She watched as the three forms she still saw only as fast moving lights, flew together in rapid patterns around empty space, covering what must have been kilometers in mere seconds. Somehow of all the many impossible and amazing things she had ever seen, it was this one that impressed her the most.

"They could just be playing, maybe trying to impress each other It's impossible to say really."

"How far away are they,"

"Not that far."

"So then we weren't being surrounded at all..."

"Not at all."

The fast moving lights, quickly turned then in a new direction all at once. In far less than a second one seemed to nearly flip itself over entirely and move off in the direction it had first come from so fast it was nearly impossible to comprehend it at all. The other two flew off together, moving faster and faster and picking up their speed gradually until they seemed to disappear but were more than likely only moving too fast to really see at all. It would have only been another instant though until they really would have been far way.

Once she was back inside the ship, and the door closed again, Clara sat on the steps again thinking and considering things she had never wondered about before. Just how long had the universe been there? Just what might have had a hand in creating anything at all? Maybe it really had been those beings of bright light she had watched. Had they really existed forever? And if they were creators of life itself just how much did they know or see, and what could they do. She could only imagine then that they had barely thought a thing of her, had they even her at all. She was so small, so simple, so human.

While she sat thinking over questions of things much greater than herself however, the Doctor, in typical form, was only growing more and more analytical about the whole matter. More and more practical. He stood at the ship's controls voicing out loud his feelings that surely the beings they had seen could only have been part of some highly unusual alien race. After all, the universe he said was so big that anything was possible, even if not likely or practical.

"See there you go again, getting all science-y and obsessing over how's and why's.

Can't that old myth be true and not just a story at all, isn't that all we need to think," Clara said, leaning against the one of the panels and shaking her head.

"Now why would we want to do that?" The Doctor looked at her as though she had just somehow grown another head and was speaking some long dead language.

"What?" Believe that maybe we actually did see the creators of the universe? It all had to start somewhere, right?"

"That would be all to simple is why."

"Maybe so. It's still fun to imagine it though... if not a little beyond mind blowing. Anyways, do you think they know we are here, in the wrong time line. Does it matter what they think of our dropping in?"

"Likely not."

Clara sat on the bed in the room she used while on board traveling. She reached over carefully to grab her laptop from the top of a nearby shelf, and nearly fell off the edge of the bed in the process. She managed to catch herself though and carefully sat back on a pile of pillows and bedding while flipping up the screen. With some hesitation mixed with a sense of curiosity she placed the disc she had found in the empty room back on Mars into the disc-drive.

Another recording of the same young man in the same room came up on her screen. He looked just the same as before, but behind him the scene had changed slightly. A few moved and rearranged objects, she realized looking closely. Computer equipment had been turned to face another direction, or perhaps he had moved his own work station. In any case, clearly some time had passed since he had last recorded on his computer. Just like before the sound buzzed for a moment, but in a couple seconds he was speaking again without only slight distortion of the audio.

"Hi. Me again of course. Umm, I'm not sure what to say to you. I don't know why I am talking at all. I know there is no one to talk to and the one I call 'you' is only really my hope and dream of someone someday finding this, someday listening and understanding. I want to communicate I guess so I know I will always actually know how to. Besides, I can't just talk to myself. I guess that'd only lead to me going insane and I don't want to do that. I've worked too hard, survived too long, to just lose my mind now. Anyways, I've been busy in here lately. Rearranging everything, trying to get the ventilation system in section ten fixed.

"I went outside yesterday, which I know full well is a bad idea by myself, but its not like I've ever had any help in the first place. I needed to check for this main section here. The roofs are basically just lightweight plastic, bolted onto the top of the whole thing after it was all sent up here... well yeah it's a bit more complicated than that of course but yeah, heavy duty sheets of building material all just tightly bolted together. Needs constant repair and checking. I worry at times the whole thing will eventually just break apart and yeah... game over basically. At any rate the roof was fine and while I was out there I got a few decent pictures. Mostly just the cliffs nearby and a couple of the sky and some interesting weather. You'll likely just think it's all silly, that this place is boring and empty, but I'll save the pictures in a file anyway"

He stopped talking then suddenly and the picture cut out at once. Clara sat staring at the screen for a moment, only feeling sad about the boy she would never know, and was long dead. The next file started to play on it's own and this time the last human boy was wearing red clothing instead his usual blue. The detail that really caught Clara's attention though was his face. Even with the image color bad as always, and the image so fuzzy, she could make out the terrible bruises over the right side, and the clearly recent bloody scrapes over his nose and mouth. He spoke though to some unseen recording equipment, with that same old way of casually speaking as though someone was listening to him.

"Hey. Franklin here again. I'm sure I must look pretty awful. I haven't actually seen myself yet but I can imagine. I fell the other day, sometime in the morning. Flew off an access ladder when something blew in section five. That's the one next to... this one... yeah that makes sense I think. This is number four. I'm still a bit confused, not quite right I guess, but I'll do the best I can. I fell about three meters. I remember waking up at some point on the cold floor, blood all over my face, barely able to move. Must have just passed out again for hours maybe a day. I eventually woke up and was able to get to my feet and make it back here. Slept most of yesterday in bed. I made myself get up today and drink water, then eat something. I'm better by now I think, just sick and hurt. And I kind feel like a bit of an idiot for the whole accident. I want to talk more though, sit in front of the computer and pretend there is still someone listening to me.

"I thought I'd tell you more about me. Just so you know there was someone out here, a living person and not just a designation number probably listed in some records file once. My favorite color is orangey red I guess, like the color of our sky on an average day. I love music. I can listen to all of the Earth's old music, saved to the records computer. It's hard to say what I like best of it. Most music is good, but for some reason I have never heard a country song I've liked. I'm educated. Well sort of. I can read and write very well. I learned so much on the old teaching computer. History was not my best subject and it honestly makes me sad to this day. But I was and still am great with mathematics. I like numbers. Facts and figures and formulas make more sense to me than most things in life. Hmm... when I was a child I used to have this crazy wish that I would wake up and find my life had all been a dream, that humanity was alive and well, that my family and I were bound for Earth soon with plans to have Christmas and new years with some relatives I had never got to meet yet. Oh, and I like taking pictures too. I think I mentioned that before. I read in bed at night. I've transferred a bunch of our old e-book files to one of the portable e-readers so I can use it in there. I love old mystery novels. I guess I should turn this off now and stop recording. I need to sleep more I think. Good night."

Clara paused the computer before it could play the next video. She sat for many long moments just looking at the now still image of young man, a lone survivor in an engineered life support structure, his face bashed up from an accident with no one to help him. Still though the smile hidden behind thoughtful eyes, never really left his face. He almost always seemed to look like that. Like he was actually capable of happiness.

She realized that she was coming to see him as a person, just like he had so clearly hinted at wanting when he talked to his computer. He was only a few years older than some of her oldest school kids. He was the kind she'd have wanted to have in her class, the thoughtful interested type that would surely have actually asked good intelligent questions, done his homework on time and wanted a future for himself. He might just have imagined that there was actually time to live beyond the next week. She wondered if He'd have been the type to wind up in detention for smoking in the parking lot. Somehow she doubted that. But he'd have had friends and been popular no doubt, so there would always have been peer pressure. She clicked the play button again, anxious to see more.

This time the boy sat in front of his computer, with a far different look about him. That old smile behind his thoughtful eyes was nearly gone entirely. He looked somehow defeated. He also looked slightly older. Clearly he had not bothered to record anything in many months or maybe ever a year. He spoke slowly, obviously thinking over what to say more than usual.

"So, I've been thinking more lately. Realizing more and more that I am really alone, not just up here, but anywhere. Humans are just something for the history books or something and and there is no one left to even write those books. We did so many great things back on Earth, or at least others did long before I came along. Huge ships sailed the oceans, someone proved the Earth wasn't flat. The first airplane, the first automobile, the first computer. The tallest building, the fastest rocket, man landing on the moon then finally on Mars. There were the Vikings, and the Native Americans, the ancient Romans. Every movie star that ever lived, every singer of every song ever sung, every driver to win the Indy 500, every team to win every superbowl. The work crews that worked to build the empire state building, every tourist to ever look down from the top of it, I guess it's all really all gone now.

"I look at the pictures and the video footage and read the old news articles of old Earth, and it seems like it's still real, just far away. I used to still hope to see it all someday looking just like a scene from some old movie or something. I day dreamed about swimming in a river, climbing my first tree, touching something on the ground outdoors with my bare hands. But I'm realizing now that it's really all gone. Everything mankind ever dreamed or did or wanted is gone forever. Billions of people dead, a planet burned up with little likely left to show there was ever a world to at all."

Clara watched him silently; feeling nearly crushed herself as he sat at that same work station he always seemed to be at, crying harder and harder until he could barely catch his breath at all, but still trying hard to say whatever it was that he was obviously trying to explain.

"I barely knew my father. He died when I was maybe four, five. I used to imagine a lot that he'd have liked to have seen what I became, but now I'm not sure. I never got to know my own mother at all. I guess she died a few hours after I was born. I remember my father, while she was alive once told me she had been happy, had been sure she did the right thing with her life. He told me she held me for a while and she picked my name, Franklin. But from what I've always understood, it was a case in the end of saving her or me, and lately I wonder where the fairness ever was. I'm sorry. I can't stop being sad these days. Nothing makes any sense. Whatever was anything ever for?"

The recording ended and this time Clara turned the computer right off.


End file.
